Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

“At least I haven’t got a sniffle problem.”

“I can never understand why you take your shoes off, and your rings off, when you’ve got to force them back on again.”

“Can’t you?” Al sipped her black-currant juice, which she brought with her in her own carton. “What can you understand?” Though Al’s voice was lazy, this was turning into a nasty little scrap. Morris had lain down across the doorway, ready to trip up anyone who came in.

“Try thinking yourself into my body,” Al suggested. Colette turned away and mouthed no, thank you . “It’s hot under the lights. Half an hour and I’m fit to drop. I know you’ve been running around with the mike, but it’s easier on the feet to be moving than standing still.”

“Is it really? How would you know that?”

“It’s easy, when you’re thin. Everything’s easier. Moving. Thinking. Deciding what you’ll do and what you won’t. You have choices. You can choose your clothes. Choose your company. I can’t.” Al drank the end of her carton, with a little sound of sucking and bubbling. She put it down, and squashed the tip of the straw, judiciously, with her forefinger.

“Oh, and the kitchen units,” Colette said.

“What’s your problem? I was right.”

“It’s just telepathy,” Colette said.

“ Just ?”

“Her granny didn’t tell you.”

“How can you be sure?”

She couldn’t, of course. Like the punters out there, she could entertain simultaneously any number of conflicting opinions. They could believe in Al and not believe in her, both at once. Faced with the impossible, their minds, like Colette’s, simply scuttled off in another direction.

“Look,” Alison said, “do we have to go through this every time? I would have thought we’d been on the road together for long enough now. And we’ve been making the tapes, haven’t we? Writing this book you say we’re writing? I’d have thought I’d answered most of your questions by now.”

“All except the ones that matter.”

Al shrugged. A quick dab of Rescue Remedy under the tongue, and then she began to repaint her lips. Colette could see the effort of concentration needed; the spirits were nagging in her ear, wanting to stake out their places for the second half.

“You see, I’d have imagined,” she said, “that sometimes, once in a while, you’d feel the urge to be honest.”

Alison gave a little comic shiver, like a character in a pantomime. “What, with the punters? They’d run a mile,” she said. “Even the ones with the blood pressure would be up and charging out the door. It’d kill them.” She stood up and pulled down her skirt, smoothing the creases over her hips. “And what would that do but make more work for me?”

“Your hem’s up at the back,” Colette said. Sighing, she sank to her knees and gave the satin a tug.

“I’m afraid it’s my bottom that does it,” Al said. “Oh, dear.” She turned sideways to the mirror and resettled the skirt at what passed for her waist-line. “Am I okay now?” She held up her arms, stamped her feet in her high heels. “I could have been a flamenco dancer,” she said. “That would have been more fun.”

“Oh, surely not,” Colette said. “Not more fun than this?” She nudged her own head at the mirror and smoothed down her hair. Damp, it lay on her head like strings of white licorice.

The manager put his head around the door. “All right?” he said.

“Will you stop saying that?” Colette turned on him. “No, not all right. I want you out there for the second half; that girl from the bar is useless. And turn the bloody air-conditioning up, we’re all melting.” She indicated Alison. “Especially her.”

Morris rolled lazily onto his back in the doorway and made faces at the manager. “Bossy cow, ain’t she?”

“So sorry to disturb your toilette,” the manager said, bowing to Alison.

“Okay, okay, time to move.” Colette clapped her hands. “They’re out there waiting.”

Morris grabbed Al’s ankle as she stepped over him. She checked her stride, took a half pace backwards, and ground her heel into his face.

The second half usually began with a question-and-answer session. When Colette first joined Al she had worried about this part of the evening. She waited for some sceptic to jump up and challenge Al about her mistakes and evasions. But Al laughed. She said, those sort of people don’t come out at night, they stay at home watching Question Time and shouting at the TV.

Tonight they were quick off the mark. A woman stood up, wreathed in smiles. She accepted the microphone easily, like a professional. “Well, you can guess what we all want to know.”

Al simpered back at her. “The royal passing.”

The woman all but curtseyed. “Have you had any communication from Her Majesty the Queen Mother? How is she faring in the other world? Has she been reunited with King George?”

“Oh, yes,” Alison said. “She’ll be reunited.”

In fact, the chances are about the same as meeting somebody you know at a main line station at rush hour. It’s not 14 million to one, like the national lottery, but you have to take into account that the dead, like the living, sometimes like to dodge and weave.

“And Princess Margaret? Has she seen HRH her daughter?”

Princess Margaret came through. Al couldn’t stop her. She seemed to be singing a comic song. Nothing derails an evening so fast as royalty. They expect to make the running, they choose the topic, they talk and you’re supposed to listen. Somebody, perhaps the princess herself, was pounding a piano, and other voices were beginning to chime in. But Alison was in a hurry; she wanted to get to a man—the evening’s first man—who’d got his hand up with a question. Ruthless, she gave the whole tribe the brush-off: Margaret Rose, Princess Di, Prince Albert, and a faint old cove who might be some sort of Plantagenet. It was interesting for Al that you got so many history programmes on TV these days. Many a night she’d sat on the sofa, hugging her plump calves, pointing out people she knew. “Look, isn’t that Mrs. Pankhurst?” she’d say. “I’ve never seen her in that hat.”

The manager—pretty quick around the room now Colette had given him a rocket—had got the mike across the hall. The man had risen to his feet. Poor old bloke, he looked shaky. “I’ve never done this before,” he said.

“Take it steady,” Al advised. “No need to rush, sir.”

“Never been to one of these,” he said. “But I’m getting on a bit myself, now, so …”

He wanted to know about his dad, who’d had an amputation before he died. Would he be reunited with his leg, in Spirit World?

Al could reassure him on the point. In Spirit World, she said, people are healthy and in their prime. “They’ve got all their bits and whatsits. Whenever they were at their happiest, whenever they were at their healthiest, that’s how you’ll find them in Spirit World.”

The logic of this, as Colette had often pointed out, was that a wife could find herself paired with a preadolescent for a husband. Or your son could, in Spirit World, be older than you. “You’re quite right, of course,” Al would say blithely. Her view was, believe what you want, Colette: I’m not here to justify myself to you.

The old man didn’t sit down; he clung, as if he were at sea, to the back of the chair in the row ahead. He was hoping his dad would come through, he said, with a message.

Al smiled. “I wish I could get him for you, sir. But again it’s like the telephone, isn’t it? I can’t call them; they have to call me. They have to want to come through. And then again, I need a bit of help from my spirit guide.”